Medical Physics Laboratory APNE E4710 Single Channel Gamma Spectroscopy

Steven Palefsky Lab partners: Shannon McKinney, Ximin Du, Igor Kravchuk

Introduction In this experiment, we measured emissions from various sources using a single channel analyzer. This measurement was performed with different window sizes to investigate the effect on resolution. By increasing the window size, one increases the resolution. Resolution is defined as:

Where FWHM is the full width at half-maximum of the emission peak in question, and C0 is its centroid. The observed resolution is a function of both the detector and the window size used to measure it. These effects add in quadrature:

Procedure The procedure from the lab handout was followed. Results and Discussion Figure 1 shows the measured spectrum from 137Cs, measured with a window size of 0.1 V. In this graph, four features are visible: The Ba K X-Ray peak near 0.8 V, the rounded backscatter peak at 2 V, the Compton edge near 4.5 V, and the full energy peak near 6.6 V.

Figure 1. Spectrum of 137Cs, measured with 0.1 V window.

The same spectrum was measured with a larger window size of 0.4 V. These results are plotted in Figure 2. The same features as above can be observed in this graph, at similar LL voltages. Figure 3 shows the spectrum of 133Ba. This measurement was performed with a 0.1 V window. Three peaks from the known spectrum seem to be visible in this chart. First, the X-Ray peak near 0.2 V (left side of the peak was not probed), a full energy peak near 0.8 V, and a full energy peak near 3.7 V. To obtain a calibration between LL voltage and energy, the following peaks were used: 662 keV peak from 137Cs, measured at 6.69 V; and 356 keV peak from 133Ba, measured at 3.66 V. This data gave a linear relation of E = 13.6 keV + 101 keV / V LL.

Figure 2. Spectrum of 137Cs, measured with 0.4 V window.

Figure 3. Spectrum of 133Ba, measured with 0.1 V window.

While the gain was set at 16x during the previous experiments, to measure the 60Co spectrum, the gain was set at 8x. This adjustment was necessary because the main peaks in 60Co are at 1.17 and 1.33 MeV, which are too high to be reached with the 16x setting. The change in gain changes the calibration such that the energy/voltage slope is double its previous value: 202 keV / V, rather than 101 keV / V as before, allowing us to reach 1400 keV with a LL setting of approximately 7 V. By using this new calibration, and the observed peaks at 5.72 and 6.46 V (Figure 4), we obtain energies of 1.17 and 1.32 MeV excellent agreement with the accepted values.

Figure 4. Spectrum of 60Co, measured with 0.1 V window and gain.

Additional Analysis and Discussion By using the Solver add-in in Excel, the photopeaks from 137Cs were fitted to a Gaussian curve for both the 0.1 and the 0.4 V windows. By analyzing the results of the fitting, we were able to calculate the detector resolution in each case. The results are shown in Table 1.

Window Centroid (V) Standard deviation (V) Full width at half maximum (V) Area (V / s) Robsvd RSCA Rdetector

0.1 V 6.685 0.2307 0.5432 90.26 0.0813 0.0102 0.0806

0.4 V 6.547 0.2667 0.6280 292.1 0.0959 0.0415 0.0865

Table 1. Gaussian fit of 137Cs data and detector resolution.

To visually evaluate the effect of window size, the data obtained when measuring radiation from 137Cs with a 0.1 V window and with a 0.4 V window were plotted on the same graph (Figure 5). To make a good visual comparison, their voltage values were shifted to line up the centroids of the photopeaks, and they were normalized to give the same area under the Gaussian curve. One can see that the 0.1 V curves peak is significantly higher than the 0.4 V curves. For two Gaussian curves with the same area, the function with the lower peak will be broader. The broadening of the 0.4 V curve can be directly observed though it is not obvious. This may be because the curve was fitted to the points near the top of the peaks, and some experimental artifact could have caused the data near the bottom of the curves to be widened or narrowed.

Figure 5. Comparison of normalized, shifted data for 137Cs, measured with 0.1 V window (red, dotted) and 0.4 V window (blue, solid).

The increase in window width caused the data to be broadened because each measurement captured a wider range of energy, therefore more measurements sampled the energy regime where the count rate was high. To put it another way, if we imagine that the count rate started to increase at 6 V, the 0.4 V window will begin to increase at 5.6 V, while the 0.1 V window will increase at 5.9 V. However, both windows will begin to decrease on the downside of the peak at similar locations. The resolution of the detector did not change when the window size changed. (Our experiment shows a small change from 8.1% to 8.7% due to some experimental error.) However, the increase in resolution when going from 0.1 V to 0.4 V caused the observed resolution to increase from 8.1% to 9.6%. Therefore, while increasing the window size can lower the time needed to make a measurement, it will also make the resolution worse, and care must be taken to balance these two effects when choosing a window size. If Compton scattering is causing contrast loss in 99mTc imaging, the problem may be ameliorated by choosing a smaller window size. The scatter will cause a loss of resolution, which can be improved with a smaller window. Conclusion Spectra were measured from various sources using a single channel analyzer. The trade-off between time and resolution was observed by changing the size of the window used to do the experiment. When the window was changed from 0.1 V to 0.4 V, the time to perform the experiment decreased significantly, but the resolution was increased from 8.1% to 9.6%.